Busy Week

I've been pretty busy this week, between classes and grading and just life in general. Today we had a power outage that affected the entire campus (save a few spots with emergency generators) for about two hours. Because of it two of H's computers no longer work. He's pretty ticked. He shorted class so he can go and play with them. I offered my husband's services, LOL. Guess I'd better give Andrew a head's up. In other news, I finished grading all of my lab reports and handed them back yesterday. I only had about six F's total, but there were a few people who were quite disgruntled. I pulled a Judy and told them that I would not be taking questions or discussing grades during class because it would take too much time, but that if anyone wanted to discuss their grade they could come by my office. That usually will cut down on the people who actually come, because they have to make a separate trip. Today is my first day after giving back grades, and as I have office hours Monday-Thursday, we'll see if anyone actually shows up. In other, other news--I'm working on my thesis proposal by gathering scholarly articles. My goal is to have at least thirty articles saved in a citation management program (I'm using Endnote) by tomorrow and then I'm going to read the abstracts and pick the first five that catch my eye, print them out at school (to save money) and then read them. I'm then going to make a list of the common methods of soil analysis that I see used by other soil bacteriologists, and present the list to Doc Friday. Also, I'm going to be working on some research questions to expand my topic from a general overview to an actual legit scientific research topic worthy of a thesis. Once I've done that, and presented a list of those to Doc, the actual writing of the thesis proposal begins. It's due on Halloween (hope that's not an omen, LOL) so that gives me roughly three weeks from today. If all goes well, I hope to have it written up by the 26, so Doc and Chris can read it and get back to me before the 31. It will give them the weekend at least. Naturally if I can get it done faster, I will. I just don't know since it's a lot on my plate and I feel like things are just going to keep coming. Of course they are, it's grad school. To lift my spirits (and yours), here are a couple of links from my new favorite tumblr "What Should We Call Grad School?": Enjoy. http://whatshouldwecallgradschool.tumblr.com/post/63389066937/remembering-that-i-missed-a-time-point http://whatshouldwecallgradschool.tumblr.com/post/62908413491/how-i-feel-choosing-to-go-to-grad-school